Swiss Steel in operation with the Material Tracking and Flow Control System (MTS) of AIS

AIS successfully completed the implementation of a MTS including Production Order Tracking in Switzerland. Swiss Steel (SWST, formerly von Moos Stahl) situated in Emmenbrücke/Switzerland has selected the AIS solution for a plant-wide Material and Production Order Tracking System, for its high performance wire rod and bar mill.

The aim of SWST was to get a solution that covers the whole production process through all material and production order routes of the entire rolling mill plant, also integrating several stand-alone systems providing relevant quality information and manual inputs.

SWST intended to increase the productivity by reducing position gaps between production orders and to prevent material mix-up along the production. A further objective was to collect high quality process data over a long period to prove and increase product quality upon the results of process data analysis.

Detailed information about each production order and piece of material is managed by the system. For each material leaving a production area, relevant quality parameters are validated against technological, production order, and customer constraints. Violations are logged and notified immediately to the operator.

Most of the process and data are recorded with a frequency of one second. All gathered production orders and processes related data are stored over a period of 15 years in a dedicated Archiving and Reporting Database. Thus this easy-to-handle application provides a maximum of information on the actual and already finished production. Swiss Steel wants to strengthen its cooperation with AIS in Level 2 process engineering and for further extensions of the system.

Mr. Benno Brun, Project Manager and System Engineer, and Mr. Georg Nussbaum, Production Manager, say: “With this system we have the best overview and control of what actually happens in production. We can intervene in time when scheduling or charging problems occur. With the big amount of collected data and analysis tools, we have means to identify weak points in our production processes. Since the introduction of the new system the productivity was significantly increased.”

The project was finished in summer 2008.

The AIS Group, headquartered in Linz, Austria, is a leading supplier of planning and scheduling systems for the metals industry. Solutions from AIS increase the efficiency of expensive heavy equipment through the optimization of capacity planning and production schedules. Numerous references worldwide of the SteelPlanner® family of planning, scheduling and control solutions underline the effectiveness and reliability of SteelPlanner® for the metals industry.

For further information, please contact:
Thomas Quinet
Advanced Information Systems sa
Researchdreef, 65
B-1070 Brussels
BELGIUM
Tel.: (+32/2) 558 52 60
Fax: (+32/2) 521 80 51
E-Mail: thomas.quinet@aisystems.be

This release was published on openPR.